Everything posted by boomervoncannon

So I see their communication across platforms is still not even. I wonder whatever happened to the claims I was given months ago that all information would be available across all official sites, yet here is someone asking a question on the official forums and you have to send them to discord, because apparently they didn't bother to also respond here. Because the official forums are STILL the red headed step child. Catering once again to the kids, not to people a little older who actually have their own money. Smart move GrapeCard™ Yet another one.
Yup, not regretting my decision to walk away from this game. I gave them every chance, but it sure looks like it's going nowhere fast.

Again, the objection I have to fast travel is that if the game is marketed as being pirate oriented, and I agree that for a game we are told is the ultimate pirate experience, there is actually no opportunity to engage in piracy (look up the definition of piracy, it involves hijacking of commercial shipping by force over water), then sailing would be a core activity of such a game. If the game is doing poorly and large chunks of the playerbase are complaining that sailing is boring, the solution is not to create a workaround which short circuits a core activity, but to improve your content in ways that makes that core activity more appealing.
The reason why I don't think fast travel is a good idea for Atlas even if that is accomplished is a phenomenon common to gaming and gamers which developers are aware of, but that gamers themselves tend to be extremely poor at perceiving. Many gamers, when confronted with an aspect of a game they find too challenging, boring, or taking up too much time, loudly call for changes to alter the experience to tone down the challenge, shorten the time investment etc etc. They most often fail to realize this has the consequence of accelerating their journey to complete boredom with the game. Especially with the MMO genre, it has been proven time and again that no development team, not even the well funded behemoth at Blizzard, can produce content faster than most gamers can comsume it. This means that time sinks and higher levels of challenge difficulty are necessary for the long term viability of any MMO. For Atlas, that would be allowing fast travel. Letting players zip back and forth across the map would only accelerate the speed with which they reached a point their boredom with the game could not be reversed, and this is assuming the present lack of meaningful content were actually eliminated, which it has by no means been.
Let me be clear, this isn't me saying "you can't have fast travel because if you do you'll suddenly be more likely to notice they haven't put much actual content in." this is me saying "Look, even IF they put in a bunch of meaningful content, allowing fast travel would inevitably lead to a large percentage of the playerbase just becoming bored with a game they might otherwise enjoy." The random encounter you never expected while moving from point A to point B can often be some of the most memorable and rewarding gaming experiences most players have in an MMO, and while fast travel looks appealing, in the end the cost of the conveniance it offers is acceleration towards tedium.
This game desperately needs to make sailing less boring because sailing is the very thing you should expect to be doing most of the time in a pirate game, not riding a bear or an elephant around while you build a base and attempt to breed veliceraptors under another name. Spare me the argument it's pirate/fantasy, yes that is a loophole that lets you shoehorn other things in, but if you don't think the majority of your prospective players are here primarily for the pirate experience, you haven't been paying attention the past year. The game is failing because you aren't providing that experience, and the one you are providing isn't at it's core holding people's interest.

ummm, what's the thing you most closely associate pirates with doing? What's the thing they are literally almost always doing when pictured in movies, tv or talked about in books? Sailing. Pirates on land who rob your convoy going back and forth aren't even pirates, they are just bandits, thieves, highwaymen etc. There are two defining characteristics of piracy: stealing commercial shipping and doing so while at sea. Piracy itself is inherently associated with sailing, so if you bought a Pirate/fantasy themed MMO and didn't expect it to involve a lot of sailing, I just wouldn't be sure what to tell you.
Where the devs have missed the boat (pun intended) is in not making the time spent sailing compelling or enjoyable enough to keep people around. There can be land based content, you can have dragons and treasure and underwater stuff sure, because it's /fantasy and that gives you a nice loophole. But look at the trailer man, look at the website, how is anyone NOT supposed to get the strong impression it's largely about piracy, and how is anyone NOT supposed to associate piracy with sailing?
Arguing that it's piracy and not a sailing game is like saying "No no it's a soccer game, not a game where they run all the time." Saying there's an "it's a sailing game" crowd is the same as saying "there's a crowd that understood what was advertised."

I see nothing to disagree with here. Something that helped previously wiped players not feel on a treadmill without giving them some positional advantage in pve or competitive advantage for pvp would be nice.
At this point I’m personally refusing to get back on that treadmill when the game’s future is iffy, Red left (she wants us to try Red Dead Redemption 2 now), and they botched the game elements I was most interested in. So now I’m standing on the sidelines waiting to see if it gets better while playing BDO (whose crafting and economy I’m liking quite nicely).

Look the game map is 90% plus water. It is pirate/ fantasy themed and advertised as such, yet people complain that the sailing is boring. This leaves two possibilities that I can see:
1. The people complaining have made a poor choice of game and are playing something unsuited to their preferences but instead of playing something else wish to have said game altered to suit what they think they would prefer. Given the amount of time you have invested probably not you but pretty definitely some of those who have played 20 mins then complained. Either way not something GrapeCard can control.
2. GrapeCard not making sailing interesting or compelling enough as an activity so that instead of viewing moving cargo as a time sink you’re eager to get back out on the water moving cargo because that’s where the adventure is. Maybe not quite to that extreme, but all MMO’s have some level of time sink. It’s just that vet players shouldn’t be viewing core activities as time sinks. That points to core activities lacking replay value and compelling engagement.
In the end I’m opposed to fast travel in this game because it sidesteps the game’s raison d’etre. Many things players say they want for reasons of convenience just wind up accelerating them towards boredom. Doesn’t sound like that would be you, but you are the exception rather than the rule.
Lastly, you get the same answer anyone gets complaining about my post length: not all of them are that way but when they are your attention span is not my problem.

Your posts and statements imply a limited level of knowledge and experience with Early Access games. It is typical for any open world pvp game which has a beta or EA period to wipe at official launch so as to provide a level playing field for all from that point forward. This would be especially true for any game where there is building and claiming of territory in a finite gaming world.
By purchasing the game in its Early Access state without appearing to fully understand what that entails, you may have invested time and energy into ingame endeavors without explicity realizing that the gane’s ongoing development means you are likely to lose what you have built up to that point.
For reasons not worth going into detail here, releasing the game as a finished product now would be ill advised to say the least, and the studio has publicly advised from the start that the EA period would be a minimum of 2 years.

Ty. I have been away dealing with my work’s busy season and a major quarterback controversy on the message boards for my Carolina Panthers. Sports fans at times can be even less reasonable than gamers. It does not help when your franchise qb is of one race and the plucky young backup who comes in and plays well while he’s out for the year is of another. All sorts of trolls take it as their cue to insert race politics.
I see that we have some new faces from the Xbox launch but that it did not result in a massive upswell in activity. That is unfortunate. Let’s hope those who have tried it stay. How do things seem to be shaking out?

Note that it’s population ranks 9th out of the 114 MMO’s the linked site tracks. I don’t think your definition of dead matches most people’s. I have been playing MMO’s for 15 years, am currently playing BDO, and it feels plenty active to me. But that’s the way internet talk goes these days, nothing but extremes because nuance is a foreign concept.
Also comparing the number of players a game has to the entire world population is meaningless, since large percentages of those 7 billion lack power grid or internet access, and billions more lack the leisure time to even take up gaming as a pastime. What is far more relevant is to compare it to games within its genre, where it ranks near the top.

Yes.
The reality is there is no mention of time because literally no one can tell you because no one knows. GrapeCard as a studio has been comically and absurdly bad at ever meeting any deadline or timeframe they set out. They could give you timeframes but they would be meaningless. Expect the next content update sometime between a month from now and the heat death of the universe.

Since islands were reworked for the Xbox launch, the information you googled was out of date unless it was posted in the last week. Ignore anything online that isn’t super new about resource locations for a while. I’m sure it’s out there, just gonna have to find it the old fashioned way.
Also welcome to the forums.

To clarify within 24 hours of when it’s built, not after 24 hours of claiming an island you demolish anything on it. The idea is that generally you want to seek an island owners approval, but it is not required. If they are active and dislike what you’ve built for any reason, they have a 24 hour window from when you place the structure to destroy it. Once you put something down and it’s been in place 24 hours, the island owner can no longer demo it.
Island owners pay upkeep in gold and if they have a tax bank in place receive bonus resources equal to 20% of all resources gathered on their island, so their incentive is to have tenants because they become an ongoing source of free mats. Tenants don’t have to pay gold upkeep but can’t build a tax bank and get free mats. Some prefer one, some the other.

Player shops without insanely over the top rent rates yes.
Auction houses which undermine core game design concepts no.
You as a grinder could make a killing with player shops just selling base mats. I would totally buy wood, metal, stone etc from you in bulk.
Realist’s Wholesale Mats Inc. “Nobody outstocks us.”

*waves his arms frantically in big look over here attention getting gesture.*
Nonono!
You’re gonna drive yourself insane. Forget the resources for now. They’ll be there once you’re done with your DP quest. Remember island owners get free resources if you come and gather on their island, so only idiots try to stop you from doing so. Smart island owners will actually build giant ramps with big signs pointing to where the valuable resources on their island are. All you really need to gather while your dp quest is active is food and what you need just to make gear and repair your ship. At this point you absolutely should not need cargo boxes because a gally’s base weight is far more than you’d ever need just to cruise around with some tames and collect dp’s
Go get your dp’s The resources you’re tempted to harvest aren’t finite. The only stuff that is “rare” are some of the cooking ingredients needed for higher end cooking recipes, but they weigh next to nothing, even in bulk. Base stuff like wood and stone, metal and thatch have 6 different varieties scattered around the map, but they are all interchangeable.
No matter what you do, if you want to build higher tier things like ship planks, cannons etc down the road, you are always gonna have to travel or trade to acquire the six different varieties of metal, wood, thatch etc. That’s the nature of Atlas and how the game encourages you to travel. But you’re not there yet. You don’t need 6 different kinds of metal to build base gear and go explore. If you try to collect all that stuff now it will just slow you down on a quest where speed is what counts.

This isn’t beta testing, it’s Early Access. When we conflate the two or regard them as interchangeable, we ignore a qualitative difference: money. Beta testers didn’t pay to test, in fact internal beta testers did so because it’s a paid job.Early Access we pay for.
Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting this means people have a right to expect a finished game. What it does mean is that they are now paying customers and do have a right to a higher set of expectations than unpaid beta testers. It is to the gaming industries advantage for players not to notice this meaningful qualitative difference and continue to use the terms interchangeably. It is not to our advantage as players to do so.
Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites require games funded that way to lay out clear goals and expectations of what backers receive for their donation. Early Access likewise should have clearly set standards and expectations. That will only happen if players stop conflating it with beta and demand a greater level of transparency and accountability in exchange for their money, otherwise gaming studios will be happy to keep right on increasing their revenue without giving us anything in return.

Can't recall who, but some guy posted here months ago thanking the devs because he was able to talk his boss into playing Atlas with him, and when the boss got stuck, he told him about eating shit in order to die and respawn. His whole point was he was living the american dream of telling his boss to Eat Shit and Die, and even getting thanked for it.
That was a great post.

You should feel free to call yourself any name you want, I promise you it troubles me not in the slightest.
Genuinely glad you're enjoying it after the 10 month wait. I enjoyed the heck out of my first couple months as well.